Intransitive Predication

Reviewed by: Count and mass across languages ed. by Diane Massam Jenny Doetjes Count and mass across languages. Ed. by Diane Massam. (Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 310. ISBN 9780199654284. $65. During the past decade there has been a growing interest in crosslinguistic variation in the domain of the count/mass distinction. Since Chierchia’s influential work on parametric differentiation of the distinction in the late 1990s (Chierchia 1998a,b), a large amount of new crosslinguistic data has become available, revealing the complexity of the question as to how to characterize linguistic variation in this domain. This collection of papers addresses many of the issues that are currently at the center of interest. The scope of the volume is very broad, both in the choice of languages that are discussed and in the linguistic subfields that are represented. The result is a book that, by means of its variety, gives a good overview of phenomena that should be taken into account in order to gain a better understanding of the various linguistic reflexes of the conceptual distinction between count and mass in the languages of the world. The book starts with a comprehensive introduction by Jila Ghomeshi and Diane Massam, summarizing the contributions of the volume, while commenting on the most important issues in current research on count and mass. The authors signal in particular that even though there are no reasons to doubt that the conceptual difference between count and mass is available to all humans, the way this difference is reflected by grammars and the lexicon varies substantially across languages. In the first paper, Francis Jeffry Pelletier sets out the main challenges for a formalization of the count/mass distinction in English. If count and mass are encoded lexically as syntactic features of nouns, one runs into the problem that nouns are usually not exclusively mass or count (e.g. chocolate(s)). By contrast, if count and mass are semantic features, one runs into the problem of mismatches between the meanings of nouns and their grammatical behavior, often discussed in relation to nouns such as furniture (semantically count but syntactically mass) and pairs of count and mass nouns with similar reference (baklava/brownies, knowledge/beliefs). Based on this, Pelletier proposes that the lexicon is blind to the distinction between count and mass. A noun such as chocolate has a denotation that comprises both chocolates and portions of chocolate-stuff. The combination of count syntax and a noun activates a semantic rule that deletes the mass part [End Page 773] of the meaning of the noun (see p. 19). The approach avoids massive ambiguity in the lexicon, but nouns such as furniture still need to be treated in a special way. Elizabeth Cowper and Daniel Currie Hall provide a possible account of these nouns, cast in the distributed morphology framework. They share Pelletier’s assumption that nouns are not marked as either count or mass in the lexicon. However, furniture is claimed to spell out as a structure that contains both a noun and the syntactic feature ‘#’ (which stands for [+count] in their system). The lexically driven presence of this feature in the syntactic structure makes it impossible to add the feature another time in a separate projection, thus explaining the incompatibility of furniture with count syntax. Crosslinguistic applications of their theory are illustrated on the basis of a few small case studies (‘apparent’ plural markers in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, and ‘apparent classifiers’ in Persian). Haike Wiese treats nouns such as furniture and footwear as so-called transnumerals. A transnumeral is defined as a noun that does not need plurality for plural reference (this phenomenon is also known as ‘general number’ and ‘number neutrality’), and in many languages this holds for all nouns. Wiese discusses several cases of transnumerality (Mandarin, Persian, Hungarian), focusing on crosslinguistic similarities. In particular, the combination of a plural marker and a transnumeral noun usually leads to special meaning effects, adding for instance a meaning component ‘many’ or ‘varied’, and the plural marker may lose its plural meaning when combined with a...

The concept of polarity is pervasive in natural language. It relates syntax, semantics and pragmatics narrowly (Giannakidou, in: Maienborn, von Heusinger, Portner (eds.), Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2011; Israel in The grammar of polarity: pragmatics, sensitivity, and the logic of scales, Cambridge studies in linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), it refers to items of many syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs and adverbs. Neutral polarity items appear in affirmative and negative sentences, negative polarity items cannot appear in affirmative sentences, and positive polarity items cannot appear in negative sentences. A way of reasoning in Natural Language is through Natural Logic (van Benthem in Essays in logical semantics, vol. 29 of Studies in linguistics and philosophy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986; Language in action: categories, lambdas, and dynamic logic, vol. 130 of Studies in logic, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1991). This logic is based on the concept of polarity in order to make the meaning of a sentence weaker o stronger without changing its truth value. There exist many proposals to compute polarity in the Natural Logic context, the most widely known are the ones by: van Benthem (1986, 1991), Sanchez-Valencia (Studies on natural logic and categorial grammar, Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991), Dowty (Proceedings of the 4th conference on semantics and theoretical linguistics, Cornel University, CLC Publications, Rochester, 1994), and van Eijck (in: ten Cate, Zeevat (eds.), 6th international Tbilisi symposium on logic, language, and computation, Batumi, Georgia, Springer, 2007). If Natural Logic is going to be used, as an inferential mechanism between text fragments, in Natural Language Processing applications such as text summarization, question answering, and information extraction, it is a priority to know what the existing relationship among the aforementioned algorithms is; for example, to implement the most general. We show in this paper the equivalence among the analyzed algorithms, filling a gap in Natural Logic research, particularly in computing polarity, and the soundness of their algorithms.

Stephen C. Levinson, Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity. Series in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb $27.99. This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real consequence for current understanding of the relation among language, gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide range of languages are used to argue that human spatial cognition is organized into a limited set of types, that cross-linguistic variation in spatial categorization is far more extensive than previously known, and that language structure has a profound, if mediated, influence on thought, gesture, and other modalities of nonlinguistic cognition. Levinson carefully separates linguistic from cognitive analyses in order to trace the relations between them. His book is also an exercise in comparative linguistics, and a strong proposal for a typology of linguistic systems of spatial representation. The scope and strength of the arguments ensure the significance of the book and the debates it has already begun to provoke (see Gallistel 2002, Levinson et al. 2002, Li & Gleitman 2002, Majid 2002).

This book explores the cross-linguistic variation in the structural encoding of the Domain of Intransitive Predication. This domain is defined as the set of non-embedded propositions which consist essentially of a one-place predicate and its argument; the typical linguistic reflection of such propositions is formed by intransitive main clauses. I assume that the domain can be seen as some ‘cognitive/ semantic space’, the topography of which is the same for all languages. Furthermore, I assume that the domain consists of four (non-discrete, and prototypically defined) subdomains, which correspond to a four-way distinction between the semantic classes of event predicates, property predicates, class predicates, and locational predicates; these four semantic predicate classes have their typical linguistic reflection in the lexical classes of verbs, predicate adjectives, predicate nominals, and predicatively used adverbials. In short, the data base of this study consists of the equivalents of English sentences such as given in (1) for each language of the sample:

What do all languages have in common, and what gives each language its individuality? Language typology, which has developed in response to these fundamental questions, is concerned with the construction of theoretical frameworks capable of delimiting the range of possible human language and of capturing constraints on cross-linguistic variation. Language typology is a major concern of all contemporary schools of linguistics, yet a coherent image of the field is difficult to form because of the diversity of theoretical orientations and practical methodologies. This text brings together for the first time original contributions from major schools of typological research, from the Prague School of the Generative Grammar tradition. Leading scholars offer first hand accounts of the theoretical foundations and substantive findings of their particulr school of thought, clarifying basic assumptions which are often not explicitly stated in the literature. The book as a whole provides a survey of the place of individual typology in an international context. It gives an overview of both the underlying unity of, and the differences in, the methods employed in the field. This work should be of interest to theoretical linguists of all persuasions who are interested in typology; historical linguists; students of the history of linguistics.

This research discusses how both theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics process natural language by clarifying the foundations which the two fields are based on. Also, this study attempts to analyze the differences and convergences that can lay a clear foundation for linguistics to be computed by studying the goals and operational procedures in different language systems such as morphology, phonetics, syntax and semantics. The research consists of an introduction and two sections. The first one is theoretical, explaining the linguistic theory with its two parts: Arabic and Western. Then the concept of computational linguistics and its role in studying, understanding, and generating the natural language processing is explored. The second section is applied, discussing the difference between theoretical linguistics and computational theories in terms of their starting points, their objectives, and the way they process linguistic systems. The research aims to represent computational procedures using linguistics in computers in order to achieve the goals of users of natural language in an ideal way. Keywords: Linguistics theory, Computational linguistics, Rule, Procedure, Computing.

This chapter considers the valid representation of directionality in the architecture of the Language Faculty by recognizing that Universal Grammar (UG) is at one and the same time both (i) a theory representing the fundamental principles and parameters that underlie all possible natural languages; and (ii) a theory of what is biologically programmed in the Language Faculty, making language acquisition empirically possible. Thus it would explain at one and the same time how both head final and head initial languages come to exist (each accounting for roughly half of the world’s languages) and how they come to be acquired (each in roughly equivalent times with roughly equivalent ease). In both ways – cross-linguistic variation and cross-linguistic language acquisition – a Language Faculty, i.e., one critically informed by UG, must be expected to integrate with language processing, i.e., to integrate with language realized in real time. The question is how. In fact, current linguistic theory of UG has brought this issue front and center. In this paper, we will attempt to explicate this issue, articulating two currently distinct and disparate views of UG and suggest that these two differ precisely in their view of how the integration of UG with language in real time is effected. Recognizing this difference and resolving it is fundamental to developing a theory of UG as a veridical component of the Language Faculty. Presumably this difference also has implications for the development of language processing models that hopes to account for the equivalent efficiency of the Human Language Parser for both right headed and left headed languages. We suggest that in conjunction with further theoretical study, more precise predictions and further typological study, both language processing studies such as those in this volume as well as language acquisition studies can and should be brought to bear on this leading issue.

Neo-Davidsonian-Based Event Class Semantic Representation

The linguistic study of the Slavic language family, with its rich syntactic and phonological structures, complex writing systems, and diverse socio-historical context, is a rapidly growing research area. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook provides a systematic review of cutting-edge research in Slavic linguistics. It covers phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, lexicology, and sociolinguistics, and presents multiple theoretical perspectives, including synchronic and diachronic. Each chapter addresses a particular linguistic feature pertinent to Slavic languages, and covers the development of the feature from Proto-Slavic to present-day Slavic languages, the main findings in historical and ongoing research devoted to the feature, and a summary of the current state of the art in the field and what the directions of future research will be. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in theoretical linguistics, linguistic typology, sociolinguistics and Slavic/East European Studies.

This article describes a corpus-based investigation of quantifier scope preferences. Following recent work on multimodular grammar frameworks in theoretical linguistics and a long history of combining multiple information sources in natural language processing, scope is treated as a distinct module of grammar from syntax. This module incorporates multiple sources of evidence regarding the most likely scope reading for a sentence and is entirely data-driven. The experiments discussed in this article evaluate the performance of our models in predicting the most likely scope reading for a particular sentence, using Penn Treebank data both with and without syntactic annotation. We wish to focus attention on the issue of determining scope preferences, which has largely been ignored in theoretical linguistics, and to explore different models of the interaction between syntax and quantifier scope.

The work presents the foundations of cognitive interpretation of the category of artistry with regard to its text realization by means of a natural language. The purpose is to formulate the theoretic principles of distinction between narration and lyric as two versions of cognitive modeling of the reality. The theoretical basis of the study is elaborated by the author “philosophy of literary word” and interdisciplinary, general humanitarian narration theory on the basis of communicative and cognitive-oriented approach. The methodology of the study is the cognitive-discursive analysis of a text. The study shows that verbal way of embodiment of the category of artistry reflects a special type of consciousness oriented towards linguo-creative and heuristic modeling of otherness which is transcendent in relation to the speaker’s reality, to that we call “simply life” which involves to two additionally distributed modes of existence – being in event and being in experience. In accordance with this, two ways of verbal cognitive modeling of aesthetic kind: (1) the narration cognitive model; (2) the lyric cognitive model. Narration is based on the model of objectification, i.e. unfolding in temporal sequence of something that happens out of subject’s zone, when so-called “outside world” is the focus; lyric realizes the model of registration of reactive non-reflected intentional experience of things which a subject feels himself, when inner world is the focus. The author distinguished consistently narration1 and lyric1 as phenomena of human everyday existence and, accordingly, narration2 and lyric2 as turning natural things into semiotic ones, nature into culture due to aesthetic transformation. Both versions of cognitive modeling of the reality are conditioned by some peculiarities of a natural language. Aesthetic transformation of “simply life” in its two versions is realized by a natural language by the use of universal mechanisms of a conceptual (cognitive) metaphor of pictorial or expressive types. In this, lyric is a kind of dominance of modus over dictum, and narration is, vice-versa, a kind of prevalence of dictum over modus. Findings are that there is not any special “aesthetic language” – we deal with the most ordinary language, simply in especial conditions of its functioning, in especial mode of communication and with especial intentionality, simply used in especial function of cognitive modeling of probabilistic states of the world and / or mind.

Preface Typographical conventions 1. Language, speech and writing 2. In defence of (so-called) autonomous linguistics 3. Linguistic theory and theoretical linguistics 4. Natural, non-natural and unnatural languages: English, Urdu and other abstractions 5. The origin of language, speech and languages 6. Phonemic and non-phonemic phonology: some typological reflections 7. Towards a 'notional' theory of the 'parts of speech' 8. Deixis as the source of reference 9. Deixis and anaphora Appendix: the scientific study of language. Inaugural lecture, Edinburgh, 1965 Notes References Subject index Names index.

Given the decomposition of a situation or state of affairs into a predicate and one or more arguments, there is surprisingly little cross-linguistic variation as to which argument is assigned to subject position of the simple active voice form of the predicate.2 The vast majority of predicates assign the same argument to subject position in all languages, whether ‘subject’ is manifested as nominative or ergative (transitive subject) case, by word order, or by verb agreement. This is true despite the fact that in terms of thematic role, the arguments assigned to subject position are quite a varied lot. This poses a challenge to any semantically-based theory of subject assignment that attempts to avoid simple stipulation of which argument is assigned to subject position. This paper will illustrate a semantic model of verb meaning that answers this challenge, by examining cross-linguistically the assignment to subject position of a class of predicates that do vary in subject assignment across languages, mental verbs.

This volume is the first book length study into the essive, a relatively unknown case marker like English ‘as (a child)’. It focuses on the distribution of the essive in contemporary Uralic languages with special attention to the opposition between permanent and impermanent state. The volume presents large sets of new data and insights into the use of the essive in nineteen Uralic languages on the basis of a typological linguistic questionnaire. The typological variation is discussed within the linguistic domains of non-verbal main predication, secondary predication, complementation, and manner, temporal, and circumstantial adverbial phrases. The descriptions and analyses are presented in such a way that they are accessible to linguists in general, descriptive and theoretical linguists, and specialists in Uralic and/or linguistic typology. The data and approach offer many starting points for further investigations within but also outside the Uralic language family.

This article explores the properties of unaccusatives in spoken Sudanese Arabic within the minimalist program. The overall aim is to testify the Unaccusative Hypothesis, in particular, the thematic and argument structure, locative inversion, there-insertion and passivization against the data from Sudanese Arabic. Grammatical judgment questionnaires were given to 10 native Sudanese speakers to test their intuition about unaccusatives. Parallel to the available literature, unaccusatives in Sudanese Arabic are defined by their semantic properties reflected syntactically in their thematic and argument structure. Unaccusatives can appear in locative inversion construction and in thereinsertion structures but cannot undergo passivization. This class of predicates takes a single argument, assigning the thematic role as Theme. Structurally, the single argument of unaccusative verbs moves from its canonical object position within VP to non-canonical surface subject position in [Spec, TP], making the structural derivation of unaccusative similar to that of passives, in that both lack external argument as well as both involve argument raising from lower position to higher position. The findings of this study manifest that languages of the world share some common properties even though they belong to different families. This in turn, provides rich information to comparative syntax, linguistic theories, and language typology.